Actually, I tried to do this maybe a year ago and gave up because there was some issue with the feed getting cut off in Planet. I’ve got a new version of WordPress running and after testing the feed with Planet, it seems to work fine so I’m going for it.

I love you all dearly, but I also love GNOME. I feel that it’s juvenile to beat down on other free software projects’ hard work. It really breaks my heart to see this going on. Don’t you think that there are more constructive and less personal ways to voice your feedback, concerns, and critiques?

If you would like to participate in juvenilecritically-important activities for the fun of it, might I suggest a more worthy cause: promoting the glorious and miraculous hot dog that will surely be the ‘weiner’ of the Fedora 16 naming contest?

He really has a chance this time; we have a solid link between Lovelock and Beefy Miracle as submitted by Max:

Hey, it can be the unpackaged open font of the week, and some weeks just don’t have fonts, right?

Crimson Text is a traditional, Garamond-inspired serif font family meant for use, as upstream terms it, a “workhorse” font that could be used generally, including flourishes, small caps, symbols, etc. The font is a lovely example of an in-progress international open font project, as it’s being creating by a team of folks:

Note that as the upstream homepage indicates, the font is under heavy development and in particular the kerning is a little dicey. While you may not want to lay out documents using this font in its current state, the typeface is certainly suitable for custom type designs for logos and the like if you’re up for adjusting the kerning manually. This is definitely an interesting project to follow.

State of the Kernel

First there was an opening talk by Jonathan Corbet, which was a report on the current state of the kernel. Some take-aways I got from the talk is we have about 1100 kernel developers currently, 300 are very active, and the pace is very fast. There isn’t any concern over attracting additional kernel developers as there is a steady influx. Jonathan went over various new features in the kernel, including a few long-term cleanup efforts that are finally getting finished up.

Boot & Init Mini-Conference

Next I attended the Boot & Initi mini-conference. We had a bit over 2 hours, and many people got up and talked about their systems and/or experience working with those systems. I tried to take some furious notes on the mini-conference’s etherpad, so check them out. Here’s a quick overview of the talks that happened:

Desktop Mini-Conference

After a great vegan lunch (major, major kudos to the conference organizers for providing these), I headed over to the Thomas Paine conference room for the Desktop mini-summit. There were a bit fewer talks, but still the talks took up pretty much all the time we had. Here’s the sessions, with links to their original proposals and my one-line summary:

EGL and GLES1/2 on Linux (Kristian Høgsberg) – Kristian is working on EGL, a platform-dependent API – almost a graphics rendering API hub – that provides a way to convert to a common object format between different rendering API object types, and also to platform-specific windowing system native types – a windowing system isn’t required to work with it though.

multi-card/gpu – can we fix it? (David Airlie) – David talked about some work he’s done to combine randr & xinerama, and walked through 4 different multiple-video-card scenarios and the work that needs to be done to make those scenarios much smoother (or in some cases, possible0 for users.

systemd and the desktop (Lennart Poettering) – Lennart mainly talked about wanting to redefine what a session means and a proposal to involve systemd in managing it. He seemed to be looking for opposition to the idea and nobody posed any.

GNOME OS (Jon McCann) – Jon proposed we work together on a distro-neutral operating system, that we need to look holistically to build an OS with a great user experience. He gave some examples on how we’ve worked holistically together before from the bottom of the stack to the user-experience (e.g., udev) and pushed us to try for more. He presented a proposed roadmap from GNOME 3.0 (core UX) to GNOME 4.0, with some interesting milestones along the way (developer experience, application store.)

The Fedora Design Team Bi-weekly Bounty is a bi-weekly (well, at least monthly! ) blog post where we’ll outline a quick-and-easy design project that needs doing for the Fedora Community, outlining all the tools, files, and other resources you’ll need to complete the project. If you’re a designer and are interested in getting involved in the free and open source community, this is a good opportunity to get your feet wet!